So one of the feature requests for qrisper.com was the ability to add photos.  A pretty simple request…the execution piece was easier than I expected.  It was implementation, specifically figuring out how and where it made the most sense for users to add photos, that gave me the most trouble.

But before I even got to the implementation bit, I had to ask myself, was I asking too much from the users?  First, they would have to answer a question.  Then if they were further inclined to add validation to their answer, they could upload an image.  Well, after having gone through the process, I can say with a clear conscious (and with not a bit of biasity) that uploading images onto qrisper.com was more fun than I expected.

There are similar features in Facebook where you can become a fan of certain things and add a jumble of images to your profile.  But I never felt a connection with those random images that quickly became clutter.  On qrisper, I feel like there is an emotional attachment , where the images you upload are tied to the opinions you provide.  And that adds a level of enjoyment to uploading images that I haven’t felt in other sites.  That concludes the self-promotional portion of this program.

Syke!  Another feature that has just become available is the ability to choose the 5 primary topics that you’re interested in and customize the top navigation bar.

Finally, I had been looking into getting a Linode to host qrisper.  However, I quickly learned that maintaining my own server is something that I’m not ready to tackle at this moment.  So Host Nexus, here we come!

The month since the last development update has been a doozy.  First and foremost, qrisper.com has gone through yet another total redesign.  We’re at the 5th iteration now, for those that are counting.  Got a ton of feedback through the good folks at HackerNews, Collabfinder and the gang from FastTrac, not to mention my loyal alpha testers.

The overall gist of the feedback was that the colors sucked and that the previous landing page was confusing/not informative.  So I totally switched up the color scheme and added more content to the landing page.  Opening up the page layout allowed me to play with a different navigation flow to and from the homepage.  Here’s what the site looked like a few weeks ago.

One major difference now is the open availability of users’ answers across the site and more emphasis on user activity.  Will this draw more users to sign up?  Let’s hope so.

A couple of other things that have been keeping me busy:

• Finally figured out how to add the question text into the url using mod rewrite.  Downside to that was I lost all of the SEO juice I had already accumulated because I didn’t bother with a redirect.
• Created a star reward system for users – now users can get stars for being active qrispers, hooray!
• Added Facebook Comments but immediately removed them due to performance issues (debating whether or not I should create my own comments).
• Users can now change their answers.

Coming up next: photo galleries, personalized categories and Linode!

I don’t know if this is how it works for other people but the less I think about a problem, the faster I can find a solution for it.  It’s like anytime I try to figure out a problem through sheer will and forceful brain flexing, I’m left beaten and frustrated.  But take a game break, surf the web or complete forget about the problem for a few days and the next time I approach the problem, it’s like it never was one.  Further evidence that procrastination is the method of creative geniuses?

Anyway, I made a number of breakthroughs during the past few weeks in my quest for the most frickin amazing website on the planet.  First off, I’m definitely getting more comfortable with ajax, as you can see from the registration validation that I’ve set up.  Never in my life did I think I’d be able to create a username and email check.  That was a great moment…(wipes away a tear). Thanks to yensdesign.com, Roshan’s Blog and the professor.

Another pain in the ass was pagination.  I tried a number of techniques found here, here and a few others.  But either I couldn’t get it working or simply didn’t like the implementation.  Finally decided on a pretty simple version of the existing pagination code that I was using.  One thing I’d like to add is the ability to dynamically hide page links when there are too many…hoping that will come to me eventually.

I’m finally making some headway in using mod-rewrite to take control of my urls.  All of the user profile pages can now be access through qrisper.com/username/.  Shout out to Stack Overflow, one frickin great resource.  Planning to use mod-rewrite across all of qrisper.com.  One concern is what kind of performance hit I’m taking using htaccess.  Will need to move that over to the Apache config file eventually.

In addition, a few other minor modifications:

• sanitized 99% of qrisper.com… there’s one or two pages that still need a thorough scrubbing but hoping to have eliminated most of the possibility for any funny business
• users can now change their previously submitted answers
• a few design/nav tweaks (tweet answer link, what’s your answer link, updates to answers/skipped/index pages

And lastly, I was using this solution to manage thumbnail images from the always helpful folks at nettuts.  But at point, I broke it.  Plus, I wasn’t complete satisfied with the quality of the thumbnails.  So now I’m using the ridiculously awesome Smart Image Resizer by Joe Lencioni.

That was a meaty update.  Next up, a city filter for local questions on qrisper.com!

Update: Ha, speaking of which…In Defense of Distraction.

Sort of hit a developer’s wall, if such a thing exists.  I’m at a point where I can visualize what I want to code but can’t yet execute consistently.

Just read this post about why programmers don’t like to code and I feel the same way.  I get amped anytime I solve something with my own code.  But more often than not, I prefer searching for pre-existing solutions and simply plugging that sucker in.  I’m not coding for the sake of coding.  I’m trying to do something that requires code…a means to an end blah blah blah.

Anyway, here are few updates:

• added an error message for when a login goes wrong (yeah didn’t have one yet)
• users can now login with either a username or their email address
• added validation to the registration form; currently working on a username and email check
• did some SEO work, adding/modifying meta tags and fixing and reloading my xml sitemap
• in the suggest question page, you can now track your suggested questions; will eventually add your friends’ suggested questions as well
• the follow/remove functionality in profile pages are now working as they should; had been having problems with those but problem solved
• replaced the Digg/Buzz links with the addthis button – that’s a great little widget

A couple of biggies.  qrisper eats is now complete.  The site is identical to qrisper except all questions are from the eats categories.  I plan to do the same for other categories as their question pool gets bigger.  Also, I definitely think I have some SEO juice going on because qrisper’s already getting hits through Google searches, with qrisper showing up in the first or second search results pages.  Pretty surprising…

Anyway, there’s a ton of things I still want to do…just have to chip away at it I guess.  I’m also looking into Elance.com and Collabfinder.com.  Gonna need some help sooner or later.

For the none of you that frequent this blog, I’m sure you’ve noticed the change to the design.  For some reason, Wordpress themes felt so foreign to me.  But I wasn’t feeling the one I had before.  So I decided to take a crack at building a theme that incorporated the look of qrisper.  Wasn’t too bad…just had to navigate through all of the Wordpress PHP.      Actually learned a couple of things about managing browser discrepancies by looking at how theme developers dealt with them.

Which brings me to IE7.  At some point, qrisper got totally broken on IE7.  Ended up using the * hack in my CSS files, which now won’t validate.  To that I say fuggem.  Rules are meant to be broken.

The development theme for the past week was spring cleaning.  I consolidated a number of pages, modularized my CSS (as much as I could), cleaned up and moved all my js files to the footer and tidied up all of my control/view files after the redesign.  qrisper just feels lighter to me now, although there wasn’t any noticeable improvement in performance.

A couple of new/updated pages:

• created a personalized 404 page…heard it’s a good thing to have
• redid the splash page screenshots after the layout redesign…but need to redo them yet again
• added Disqus comments to all answer pages.  I had comments in the pre-alpha version of qrisper but took them out because of poor site.  Still kinda slow but the ability to sign in via Facebook Connect was irresistable.  Too bad that ain’t working…can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong
• Tweaked my existing autocomplete functionality…basically made it look nicer.  Only thing missing now is to add keyboard navigation functionality.

Next up on my list is security and validation.  I’m already using sanitize classes to filter out all user input but I want to add additional layers of security.  Also want to incorporate jquery into the validation process so that users have a clear sense of what’s going on.